I have secretly admired him ever since I saw that shot of him shirtless on a horse, out in the mountains on a steed with a gold halter and him with a cross on a chain around his neck. A devout, God-fearing man, at one with his steed in the great outdoors.
He was wearing green camo pants and the kind of pale yellow boots you get from Workwear and looking every bit like the bulwark against the imperialist oppressors of the West that he represented to me – at least until The Donald came along.
The Donald didn’t have dogs but he had Melania as an agreeable companion. These days I don’t see Melania anywhere that The Donald is, for the past year or so anyway – I mean, you’d have to ask what she sees in him apart from dollars for designer clothes – whereas Mr Putin at least has his dogs. Four of them.
He has his Bulgarian shepherd dog, Buffy, which was given to him by former Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov; and Buffy is the oldest dog in the Putin house, by all accounts. Then there is Yume from the Akita-Inu breed, who came from Japan after the tsunami. The Alabai puppy, Verni, was given to Mr Putin by the president of Turkmenistan – this is a large breed when it grows up and we haven’t heard much about it since; and the youngest is a Sarplaninac, a glossy and thick-coated breed, with the name Pasha. Pasha was gifted to Mr Putin by the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic.
So this is in his favour, if you overlook for a second his capacity to kill innocent civilians to satisfy his ego-driven ambitions. And he played The Donald on a break and for a long time seemed to be Mr Cool, keeping his cards close to his chest and wagging his tail just enough to keep the other foreign dogs relaxed but not enough for them to go to sleep.
Now he has woken them up and not in a good way. For a long time, from a dog’s point of view, he was slowly creeping towards the bone and the carcase, without alarming the other dogs in the pack. Then, all of a sudden, he throws caution to the wind and makes a violent and murderous leap for it.
If he had kept on creeping, he might have got there in the end with a mix of pressure, tid-bits and occasional barking. But he didn’t – he lunged at it in a way that no-one expected. This gets every dog’s back up, straight away.
So what’s his end-game? The Boss reckons he has departed from his long-patient strategy because he’s not well and thinks he has limited time.
“Look at his pudgy face these days, General,” he says. “There’s something not right. I think he’s crook and doesn’t care what misery he inflicts.”
From a dog’s point of view, he is now that type of angry, malevolent dog that attacks and mauls anything in its way for no good reason. He acts like that kind of dog. He even looks like a dog. Woof!
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